[hnlmorg]

You’re discussing modern tooling in a conversation about early UNIX tooling. Back in the period being discussed, even ‘read’ was less functional. Ksh introduced a lot of the stuff we now take for granted, some of which wasn’t even available until the Ksh93 (long after Perl was released). Bash itself is a younger project than Perl. Albeit not by much.

[imiric]

Fair point. I'm not arguing that Perl wasn't an improvement back then, but that the approach of composing Unix tools is not inherently bad. And as the shell ecosystem evolved since then, and more capable programming languages appeared, Perl has been left by the wayside as a historical relic, rather than the replacement of Unix tools that Wall envisioned.

So I don't disagree that it was needed back then, but it's important to mention the modern context it struggles to exist in.

[hnlmorg]

Perl is still a commonly used tool chain. It is far from being a “historic relic”.

I agree that there’s nothing wrong with composing UNIX tools. I mean, that was one of its key selling points. if you watch any early promo videos for UNIX you’ll see them talk heavily about the composability of the command line and shell scripting. It wasn’t an accident — it was designed that way.

The point of the conversation wasn’t to say that one shouldn’t write shell scripts, it was just to say that there was a massive and unfilled gulf between what was easy to do in Ksh, awk and sed, and what could be done in C.